'Frownland,' director Ronald Bronstein's microbudget indie

Michael Phillips

Nerve-rackingly funny, director Ronald Bronstein's microbudget indie features a protagonist for whom each attempt at communication turns into a rhapsody of strangulated verbiage. The first scene sets the tone: Keith (played by Dore Mann) is in a car with his maybe/former girlfriend (Mary Wall, Bronstein's wife). She's crying her eyes out. "When I was a kid I never really/never really/I never really/never really cried," he says by way of apology for his benumbed yet sweaty presence/absence in this poor woman's life. Keith is a perpetually mewling, sweating refugee from a Mumblecore picture—actually, Mann's characterization makes the run-of-the-Mumblecore-mill sound like Oscar Wilde—saddled in his grubby outer-borough apartment with a hilariously hostile roommate who won't pay the light bill.

"Frownland" follows one character for a while, then another, but it never loses sight of Keith—and poor Keith is not, in Bronstein's savvy hands, an object of pity or pathos. He's a uniquely tuned comic engine. I don't know, I guess he's not so exotic to me: I've certainly had roommates with worse social skills than this guy.

Mann's performance rivets your attention, though, and when he's released (by his long-delayed tears and the sunrise) into a different place at the end of the picture, the result is weirdly potent. Bronstein wrote (with contributions from his players) and edited as well as directed, shooting in 16 mm. The coarse-grained texture of the images, blown up to 35 mm, is perfect: The look is not an affectation, simply an approach, and in the best way "Frownland" looks, feels and breathes like a black-comic throwback to 1980s indie cinema.